10 Advanced SEO Tactics That Will Increase Your Blog’s Traffic

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Starting a blog is pretty simple. Actually getting people to visit it is hard. It’s not enough to just create great content and hope they will come…

Because they won’t.

Today’s successful blogs dig into a deep bag of tricks that include SEO, design and analytics…and then combine these elements into ever more advanced tactics that help them drive traffic to their sites, grow their audience and rank high in the search engines.

Make it easy for people to find your content over the web

One of the latest developments at Google is author markup. This feature allows you to connect all of your content across the web beneath one author/bio profile.

For instance, here’s what Danny Sullivan looks like on the search engine results page on a search for “SEO advice”:

The image of Danny sets him apart from other SEOs, and if you click on the “by Danny Sullivan” link you land on his Google+ page:

Click on the “More by Danny Sullivan” and you get a Google results page dedicated to his content:

As you can see adding author markup feature to you social identity will improve your chances in search results, increasing click throughs to your content.

Implementing author markup isn’t easy, however, unless you check out AJ Kohn’s guide on how to implement REL=AUTHOR. This is a great guide that AJ put together with the help of three Google engineers.

Strategically join relevant audience communities

One thing about link building and SEO strategy that gets missed so often is the relationship…actually getting to know people is the bedrock to getting links.

You do this by participating with your audience where they are hanging out. A really great way to make this very strategic is to use Google’ doubleclick planner.

Here’s how it works. Drop in a relevant web address…

Then copy down the list of sites that it creates:

You can start at the top of that list and start visiting, reading and sharing comments on those sites. In time you will start to create relationships with some of the other readers that will lead to links and traffic.

Doubleclick will also give you an idea of the typical interests of your audience (based upon the web address you enter):

I’ve found this list great for strategically pursuing other industries that might need my help. It’s also a great way to come up with content for guests posts.

As you add value to these different communities, people will start rewarding you with links and traffic. Avoid spamming and dropping self-promotion links…the community will ignore you if you do that.

Use Super-Sized Images, Photos and Illustrations

But when it comes to great blog/site design and attracting links, just sharing any old photo won’t do the trick. Besides, why not leverage the excellent resolutions of new monitors by sharing beautiful photos?

Even though it’s been less than a year since their last redesign, Fast Company redesigned their blog so they emphasize photos and images on their site.

It’s reviving it’s readership with these outsized photos, drawing readers and links alike. Some sites like Cabin Porn are even taking it farther by filling the entire screen. This kind of out-sized use of photos leads to new viewers and links.

Think Outside of the Social Media Sharing Box

Facebook, Twitter and Google+ aren’t the only social sites that have the power to push traffic to your site. Other niche communities can do the same thing:

The idea is to go through a list of social networking sites, identify the ones that would be relevant to your industry and then systematically add value. As you build up relationships with users of those sites you’ll eventually start to gain links and followers.

Working these other social sites will also help you develop content for you blog posts. Watch to see what is gaining popularity in content and discussions and then create posts that address those issues.

As you strategically choose these sites and dive into the conversation, you could get some links and traffic as part of the process.

A great example of this was when Rand Fishkin jumped on Fred Wilson’s AVC blog to disagree about a post Fred had written about marketing. Fred wrote a follow up the next day with a link back to Rand’s post.

You can find the latest buzz and trending conversations by using sites like TechMeme, Topsy, Alltop, MediaGazer and PopURLs. These are quick sites you can scan to find headlines that might be of interest to you.

Design Around These 3 Crucial Elements

A lot of the things I’ve been discussing up to this point are off-page optimization and link building tactics…so now it s a good time to discuss what your site looks like and how it performs.

You could spend a substantial amount of time involved in all of the above tactics, but if your site is not clean and beautiful, then you may not get the links. So you’ve got to build great, usable design.

But it also needs to be fast. So, when designing your site and to make the most out of your SEO link building efforts, follow these three tips ruthlessly!

Build a beautiful web design – We are in a time where sentiment search is growing, so what a user actual thinks and feels about your site will impact rank, links and conversion. Invest in a great design!

Site speed – This is essential. A slow site will drive traffic away. In fact, Google proved that users are much happier when search is faster. To test this they slowed down their results by as little as 400 milliseconds and reduced the number of searches by half a percent! So, evaluate your site speed.

Use Egobait

This is a list that ranks the top marketing blogs based on a few key KPIs. The genius behind the list is how it drives traffic back to its site, making it a very powerful link bait tool.

In this particular case, the Power 150 is called “ego bait” because it appeals to the ego of those on the list. And if you are on the list, then you have the option of embedding the Power 150 badge on you site, which then…you guessed it…links back to Ad Age.

That’s a very powerful SEO traffic driver.

This can work for you by creating a top ten list and then offering a badge for those who make it on to the list. Write to Done’s Top Ten Blogs for Writers is a great example.

Crawl and Validate Your Site

By the way, one of your first steps to enhancing your site and using advanced SEO tactics to drive traffic to your site is to determine where your site is by crawling and validating it.

What exactly should you validate? Here’s a checklist:

HTML/XHTML

CSS

Accessibility (Section 508 and WAI Standards)

Dead links

Feeds

Multiple browsers

Multiple devices

Now, more importantly, how do you validate your site? Use these two tools: Crawl Tools by SEOmoz or visit the W3C validation tools. Both of these tools will help you find all the problems that need to be fixed on your site…and the priority…before you start link building.

Repeat the process until you’ve got a clean site.

Test, Track, Measure and Tweak to Improve Success

No campaign is complete without analytics. So all this SEO and link building work you are pouring into your site can not be improved if you don’t measure results.

Here’s what you have to do at the minimum:

Google Analytics – Create an account, embed the tracking code on your site and start collecting data. Do this immediately to create a benchmark before you start any kind of campaign. Understand where you are before you try to grow. That’s your simplest measure of success.

Webmaster Tools – Sign up for both Google and Bing webmaster tools to stay on top of the data that your site is generating. Bing may not deliver the same amount of traffic as Google, but it is sending roughly 30% of search traffic, and is likely to grow. Don’t ignore it!

RSS Feed Analytics – More than likely you will be pushing out content through an RSS feed so make sure you are paying attention to these metrics, too. You can do this with Google Analytics.

Browser Tests – You’ll also want to make sure that your design and the photos that you are sharing on your site are looking good across browsers. This doesn’t mean all browsers, but a general rule of thumb is to test on a browser with at least 2% market share. Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari are all safe bets.

Online Usability – While code analytics are great for tracking online behavior you are still left to interpret the results. With a usability test you can listen to what the user was thinking while they navigated through your site. For $40 a test, usertesting.com will give you a video of the person going through your site and typed comments about issues encountered.

You will never know if you are winning or losing if you don’t track your results. Analytics will help you learn from your mistakes, jump on new opportunities and reach your site’s fullest potential.

Conclusion

Increasing traffic to your blog is an art that combines more and more advanced techniques…and as you pile up these techniques (and the links!) you will slowly grow your blog and ultimately dominate in your industry.

And by the way, SEO link building is progressive and never-ending, so don’t give up if you aren’t getting the kind of results you want right away.

What new and advanced SEO tactics have you been using to drive traffic to your blog?

Hi Neil, great post. Its quite comprehensive and cover lots of points. I definitely agree with you about the Google author markup, its a great feature for blog writer’s to get visibility and the ‘due’ for their content.

Thinking outside the box about social media box is a great one, specially in the current times when everybody is harping on the social media angel.

Your point about using picture on blogs is quite right one. I have noticed my own blog post receiving much higher views when they include pictures and other forms of media.

Super Post Neil, i like espeically the piece about Google Adplanner, because it does make sense for authority in in your own peer group and linkbuilding but as well urges you to commit to your own community.And by the way as John said next thing to do is rel=authorAlexander121WATT

Thanks, Neil! Just when I think I’ve got everything covered, somebody points to an obvious trick I’ve been missing… In this case the Doubleclick AdPlanner is a tool I’ve not used but can see the sense in doing so immediately.

Also, I think there’s value in old fashioned PR releases to news sites, particularly where your products or services are local, getting featured in local news sites is a lot easier than trying to get featured in the international media but provides *reach* far more effectively to your target audience.

Neil some great tips here, thinking outside the box is definaltley a winner, even though you may get less traffic, but it will be targeted and high converting traffic. Which is what a business owner wants, traffic that contributes towards the bottom line.

Damn I am baffled. I do Web design mostly but SEO is such a discipline of the details. And it changes just as fast as designing websites. At least you had a good word for designers. Looks DO matter, trust me. Nobody likes to see those asstastic sites.

Once you establish relationships with other bloggers, look for guest posting opportunities. A guest post can help to build links to your blog and drive traffic. If readers like what they see, they will click over to your blog for more information.

These are great ideas. But the issue with blog traffic is that it rarely converts as well as traffic for main site keywords. This is why it is important to create soft conversion on your blog to justify the work for traffic acquisition. Overall this is a great post and Neil knows his stuff!

Thank you for a really good article. I am still learning about driving traffic. I feel I can do a pretty good job creating websites and providing good information, but making a good (or even great) website isn’t really enough. Thanks again!

With all your techniques, tips and tricks we surely can increase the traffic. But then we get another issue. How to manage the traffic???

So we really do not consider abut this issue. We think, ok we have a website, started doing SEO and other techniques to improve the site rank, now getting visitors/traffic, we are done. But you need to consider whether your server/host can manage it or not.

I had this issue few years ago. I was using a Shared Hosting since it was cheap. So after receiving a huge number of visitors I saw that the server couldn’t manage it well. I was searching for a better way to host my website.

So I found that using a Dedicated Server or VPS is ideal. I didn’t have fund to spend for a dedicated server (they are really expensive) then I bought a VPS (from VPSWEBSERVER and still using it). My VPS can handle any number of visitors and also it is always up. I had to upgrade my plan two times with the progress. So I always recommend people to use a VPS with the progress of your website/blog.

Just wanted to add this since I found that your article is really great.

Neil, great post! I agree with your recommendations. Although SEO takes a lot of time and effort initially, I truly believe you will reap the benefits of your hard work. Not only will you drive traffic to your website, you will also be building relationships and valuable connections with your peers and potential customers.

Those tips actually do work. But people still need to know how crucial paid advertising is, or free blogging privileges on sites like seomoz and increasetraffictomyblog.com. Let’s face it, the internet is wrapped up and even with the best seo, you have to spend money or write high quality content. It is what it is.

Great article . I saw some new sites under the think outside of the social media sharing box section that I am going to visit. I believe that giving something of value to your visitors is important and you really do Neill.